Scratch Pad 21 February 1997

Graphic by Ditmar Scratch Pad 21

Based on the non-Mailing Comments section of The Great Cosmic Donut of Life No. 10, a magazine written and published by Bruce Gillespie, 59 Keele Street, Victoria 3066, Australia (phone (03) 9419-4797; email: [email protected]) for the February 1997 mailing of Acnestis. Cover: Ditmar (Dick Jenssen).

Contents

1 IAIN M. BANKS: 6 BOOKS READ SINCE NOVEMBER 1996 by Bruce THE ‘CULTURE’ SCIENCE-FICTION NOVELS Gillespie AND THE ECONOMICS AND POLITICS OF SCAR- 7 PRECIOUS TIME by Marc Ortlieb CITY AND ABUNDANCE by Race Mathews 9 FAVOURITE BOOKS 1996 by Bruce Gillespie 6 MY CAREER GOES BUNG by Bruce Gillespie

RACE MATHEWS is a Senior Research Fellow in the Graduate School of Government at Monash University. He has served previously as a Victorian government minister, a federal MP and a municipal councillor. His Australia’s First Fabians: Middle-Class Radicals, Labour Activists and the Early Labour Movement was published by Cambridge University Press in 1993, and he is currently writing about the Distributist and Co-operative Movements.

Iain M. Banks: The ‘Culture’ science-fiction novels and the economics and politics of scarcity and abundance

by Race Mathews

Paper delivered for the Nova Mob by Race Mathews, 6 of peace will be those areas — roughly corresponding to the November 1996. This was delivered on the same night as current developed world — where conditions of relative my own ‘A Taste for Mayhem: ’s Non-SF Novels’. abundance take the sting out of social frictions and enable Both are preprints from SF Commentary 76. democratic institutions and relative social harmony to be maintained. The zones of turmoil are the rest of the world In 1993, the American scholars Max Singer and Aaron — roughly corresponding to today’s lesser-developed coun- Wildavsky made a much-discussed contribution to futur- tries — where life continues to be dominated by the struggle ology with their book The Real World Order: Zones of Peace, for scarce resources among individuals, interest groups, Zones of Turmoil.1 Their theme is the economics and politics social classes and nations. Singer and Wildavsky argue that of scarcity. The book argues that it will be roughly another the challenge for policy-makers is how to contain and quar- hundred years before science and technology reach a point antine the tensions in the zones of turmoil so that the zones where the world’s consumption requirements can be satis- of peace can as much as possible get on with developing the fied. Throughout the intervening period, the globe will be scientific and technological know-how which will ultimately divided into zones of peace and zones of turmoil. The zones — a century from now — enable us to come together as a unified and harmonious planet-wide social order. Objection could be taken to this view on the grounds 1 Singer, M. and Wildavsky, A., The Real World Order: Zones of that it is — among other things — unoriginal, superficial, Peace, Zones of Turmoil, Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1993.

2 immoral and at variance with such observable facts as that They could make anything was capable of the increasing aggregate wealth of the prospective zones of making, contained all the knowledge the Culture had ever peace is not so far resulting in any appreciable diminution accumulated, carried or could construct specialised equip- in the struggle for resources within them, or enhancing ment of every imaginable type for every conceivable even- either democratic institutions or social harmony or prevent- tuality, and continually manufactured smaller ships. Their ing the emergence of an under-class whose deprivation in complements were measured in millions at least. They many cases is as great as could be found, for the most part, crewed their offspring ships out of the gradual increase in in any zone of turmoil. Science fiction readers may well their own population. Self-contained, self-sufficient, pro- ductive and, in peacetime at least, continually exchanging suspect that social and political pathologies will result in a information, they were the Culture’s ambassadors, its most global future that more closely resembles the world of visible citizens and its technological and intellectual big Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner than John W. Campbell Jr’s For- guns. There was no need to travel from the galactic back- getfulness. woods to some distant Culture home-planet to be amazed What is also apparent from the science-fiction perspec- and impressed by the stunning scale and awesome power of tive is that we have been here before. Singer and Wildavsky the Culture: a GSV would bring it right up to your front are one more instance of science playing catch-up with door. science fiction. That problems arise where societies charac- The ships are operated — and society more generally is terised by abundance co-exist with those characterised by largely administered — by Artificial Intelligences known as scarcity has been a science-fiction trope for as long virtually Minds.2 as the genre has existed. Moreover, it is in science fiction that the consequent moral and political complexities of the John Clute’s entry on Banks in The Encyclopedia of Science juxtaposition have the more successfully been identified Fiction rightly notes that: ‘There are no Empires in the and explored. For example, to what extent is quarantine or Culture, no tentacled Corporations, no Enclave whose hid- containment either a moral or a practical option? Is there den knowledge gives its inhabitants a vital edge in their an obligation on the part of societies characterised by attempts to maintain independence against the military abundance to assist those which are less well off, and, if so, hardware of the far-off Czar at the apex of the pyramid of to what extent and by what means? Where does alleviating power.’3 Abundance born of science and technology has scarcity leave off and intrusion by the donors on the cultural long since made redundant the need for the population to and social integrity of the recipients take over? Can inter- compete economically with one another. Inasmuch as the vention in the interests of averting loss of life and suffering Culture has a political philosophy, it loosely combines the be reconciled with respect for the independence of the better elements of anarchism, socialism and communitari- society where they are being experienced and the need for anism, in a manner broadly reminiscent of William Morris it to make mistakes in order to learn from them, and, if so, and News from Nowhere. ‘The Culture’, says Banks, ‘is my idea what are the limits of intervention? of Utopia’: These and other related questions have nowhere been more effectively posed in science-fiction terms than in the Or at least as close as you can get to Utopia with what we work of Iain M. Banks. Banks’s intellectual stock in trade in regard as recognisably human stock. I’d love to live there, key respects resembles that of Singer and Wildavsky, albeit and that’s been the guiding principle behind the whole restated against a galactic backdrop. The major preoccupa- thing. Not that it always comes out that way in the books, tion of his science fiction is with whether — and, if so, on because I’m trying hard not to make it look wonderful and 4 what terms — societies characterised respectively by abun- goody-goody and all the rest of it. dance and scarcity can co-exist. Unlike Singer and Wildavsky, Banks also has interesting things to say about the The Culture’s preferred relationship with other species advantages and disadvantages that living in an abundance and societies is one of peaceful co-existence, tempered by economy and a utopian social order might be found to the need to fend off such military challenges as may occa- have. He is in every respect a more readable, engaging and sionally arise, and the urge to intervene — some within the thought-provoking writer than Singer and Wildavsky. Culture might call it meddle — where the predicament of Cynics might go so far as to say that his extrapolations are local populations is felt to be intolerable. Intervention is the no less likely than those of Singer and Wildavsky to come business of a Special Circumstances agency, which is fre- true. quently violent and unscrupulous in meeting its objectives. The activities of the Special Circumstances agency are what The Culture much of Banks’s writing is about. The pre-eminent social order of Banks’s universe is known simply as the Culture. Its inhabitants are human, albeit of non-terrestrial origin and in key respects genetically en- The core Banks issues are posed in simplest and starkest hanced. Their homes are predominantly the General Sys- terms in the novella The State of the Art, from Banks’s collec- tems Vehicles — planet-size spaceships — in which they tion of short fiction of the same name. The year is 1977. A move between the stars: General Contact Unit from the Culture — a spaceship of massive size and awesome capacities, but in turn only a General Systems Vehicles were like encapsulated worlds. minor component of the infinitely larger General Systems They were more than just very big spaceships; they were Vehicle which Banks describes casually as currently ‘tramp- habitats, universities, factories, museums, dockyards, lib- ing a thousand years core-ward’ — stations itself in the raries, even mobile exhibition centres. They represented the Culture — they were the Culture. Almost anything that could be done anywhere in the Culture could be on a GSV. 3 Clute, J., ‘Iain M. Banks’, in Clute, J. and Nicholls, P. (eds), The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, London: Orbit, 1993, p. 88. 4 Banks, I. M., Interview with Stan Nicholls, Interzone, No. 86, 2 Banks, I., Consider Phlebas, London: Orbit, 1987, pp. 220–1. August 1994, p. 22.

3 vicinity of Earth. The purpose of the visit is to enable the cided to stay behind dying in a back alley brawl, and the ship’s Mind — and the wider community of Artificial Intel- departure of the GCU from the solar system. Observation ligences of which the Mind belongs — to assess whether machines have been put in place, but mankind is to remain mankind is at a point where contact should be initiated. undisturbed and free to work out its destiny for itself. Crew members travel widely on the surface to observe human behaviour at first hand and experience human Consider Phlebas society. One of their number is seduced by the relative Conflict between the Culture and another space-faring variety and unpredictability of what he is seeing, opts to stay species — the Idirans, who see the ‘repressive tolerance’ of behind when the GCU leaves and goes so far as to have the the Culture as a threat to their independence and religious Mind strip him of his genetic enhancements in order to faith — is the backdrop to Banks’s first Culture novel, approximate more closely to the race he proposes to join.5 Consider Phlebas, which appeared in 1987. The spaceship of At the same time the Mind is concluding that mankind is a recently created Mind is destroyed by more numerous not yet ready for contact, and that the Earth should be Idiran forces, so obliging the Mind to take refuge on a categorised as a control world in a wider process of observ- nearby planet to which access has been generally closed-off ing whether certain social pathologies inevitably cause the on instructions from the Dra’Azon, beings so superior to — societies which exhibit them to self-destruct. and remote from — either the Culture or the Idirans as to The downside of the Culture — the tug of decadence — be regarded by both as to be given a wide birth and on no is hinted at by Banks’s description of an Earth-style banquet account provoked. Recovering the Mind becomes the task which takes place on the GCU. It reads in part: of Bora Horza Gorbuchul, from an endangered species known as Changers, who trade in impersonations on the Li walked purposefully to the head of the middle table, basis of their ability to physically alter their appearances. tramped on an empty seat at its head and strode purpose- Banks sees Consider Phlebas as having ‘distinctly yarnish fully on to the table top, clumping down the brightly tendencies’: polished surface between the glittering place settings (the cutlery had been borrowed from a locked and forgotten I mean, when you come down to it, that was a story about a storeroom in a palace in India; it hadn’t been used for fifty ship-wrecked sailor falling in with a gang of pirates and years, and would be returned, cleaned, the next day . . . as going in search of buried treasure.7 would the dinner service itself, borrowed for the night from the Sultan of Brunei — without his permission), past the In fact, Consider Phlebas has far more to it than Banks’s starched white napkins (from the Titanic; they’d be cleaned flippancies allow. As Banks elsewhere acknowledges, one of too and put back on the floor of the Atlantic), in the midst the ideas behind the book is that ‘What usually happens is of the glittering glassware (Edinburgh Crystal, removed for that people suffer and die and get involved in all sorts of a few hours from packing cases stowed deep in the hold of mayhem and catastrophe and it doesn’t make that much a freighter in the South China Sea, bound for Yokohama) difference in the end’: and the candelabra (from a cache of loot lying under a lake near Kiev, sunk there by retreating Nazis judging from the There’s a big war going on in that novel, and various sacks; also due to be replaced after their bizarre orbital individuals and groups manage to influence its outcome. excursion) until he stood in the centre of the middle table. But even being able to do that doesn’t ultimately change things much. At the end of the book, I have a section The passage continues a little later: pointing this out by telling what happened after the war, which was an attempt to pose the question ‘what was it all ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Li said, standing with a bowl in for?’8 one hand and a silver fork in the other. ‘A little taste of Earth . . . no; more than that: a chance for you to participate Consider Phlebas is also notable in at least two other in the rough and tumble of living on a squalid backwater planet without actually having to leave your seat or get your respects. Banks’s drones — autonomous air-borne minor feet dirty.’ He stabbed a bit of the meat, put it in his mouth, artificial intelligences tasked to serve and protect citizens of chewed and swallowed. ‘Human flesh, ladies and gents; the Culture — are a major addition to the long line of cooked muscle of hom. sap. . . . as I suspect a few of you might memorable alien lifeforms created by science-fiction have guessed. A little on the sweet side for my palate, but writers, from Stanley Weinbaum’s ostrich-like Martian, quite acceptable. Eat up . . . I had the ship take a few cells Tweel, to the Moties of Larry Niven’s The Mote in God’s Eye. from a variety of people on earth. Without their knowledge Some drones are the pure stuff of P. G. Wodehouse of course. . . . Most of you over there will be eating either humour, reminiscent in particular of the greatest of all stewed Idi Amin or General Pinochet Chilli Con Carne; Wodehouse’s characters, Jeeves, but also of servants more here in the centre we have a combination of General generally as Wodehouse contrasts them with the lotus- Stroessner Meat Balls and Richard Nixon Burgers. The rest eaters of his effete and ineffectual aristocracy. Others are of you have Ferdinand Marcos Saute and Shah of Iran arch-manipulators in the tradition of Machiavelli. ‘It’s won- Kebabs. There are, in addition, Fricaseed Kim Il Sung, derfully easy to get into the machine’s mind,’ says Banks. ‘I Boiled General Videla and Ian Smith in Black Bean think my best characters are actually machines.’9 Sauce . . . all done just right by the excellent — if leaderless 6 Banks similarly is into homage, notably — if sometimes — chef we have around us. Eat up! Eat up!’ tongue-in-cheek — to the tradition of space opera pio-

The novella ends with the crew member who has de-

5 Renunciation of the Culture is also the theme of Banks’s 7 Banks, 1994, p. 23. short story ‘A Gift from the Culture’. See Banks, I. M., The 8 Banks, 1994, p. 22. State of the Art, London: Orbit, 1991, pp. 10–28. 9 Banks, I. M., Interview with Alan Stewart, Ethel the Aardvark, 6 Banks, 1991, pp. 180–1. No. 94, March 1992.

4 neered sixty and more years ago by E. E. Smith. Space over its formseats and couches and low tables; the screams warfare as described in Consider Phlebas evokes nothing so of species, men, women, children. Sometimes they were powerfully as classic passages of space opera overkill such silenced quickly, but usually not. Each instrument, and each as in Smith’s 1934 novella Triplanetary, which reads in part: part of the tortured people, made its own noise; blood, knives, bones, lasers, flesh, ripsaws, chemicals, leeches, Far below, in number ten converter room, massive switches fleshworms, vibraguns, even phalluses, fingers and claws; drove home and the enormous mass of the vessel quivered each made or produced their own distinctive sounds, coun- under the terrific energy of the newly-calculated, semi- terpoints to the theme of screams. . . . ‘This is no special material beam of energy that was hurled out, backed by the night, Gurgeh, no festival of sado-erotica’, explained Flere- mightiest of all the mighty converters and generators of Imsaho, ‘These things go on every evening. . . . There is 12 Triplanetary’s superdreadnought. The beam, a pipelike more, but you’ve seen a representative cross-section’. hollow cylinder of intolerable energy, flashed out, and there was a rending, tearing crash as it struck Roger’s hitherto There is a conspicuous echo here of Li’s banquet in Consider impenetrable wall. . . . And speeding through that terrific Phlebas. conduit came package after package of destruction. Bombs, Elevation to the office of Emperor of Azad goes to the armour-piercing shells, gas shells of poisonous and corro- winner of the game of the same name. That Gurgeh is sive fluids followed each other in quick succession. . . . Thus victorious — that the regime is destroyed — is due in part it was that the end came soon. A war-head touched steel to the Special Circumstances agency. Gurgeh returns plating and there ensued a space-wracking explosion of home, troubled by a feeling of having been manipulated atomic iron. Gaping wide, helpless, with all defences down, which he can neither explain nor dismiss. Banks has the other torpedoes entered the stricken hull and completed doomed Emperor, Nicosar, speak for critics of the Culture its destruction even before they could be recalled. Atomic whose outlook is less benign: bombs literally volatilized most of the pirate vessel; vials of pure corrosion began to dissolve the solid fabric of her ‘You disgust me, Morat Gurgeh’, Nicosar said to the red substance into dripping corruption. Reeking gases filled glow in the west, ‘Your blind, insipid morality can’t even every cranny of circumambient space as what was left of account for your own success here, and you treat this battle- Roger’s battle cruiser began the long plunge to the game like some filthy dance. It is there to be fought and ground.10 struggled against, and you’ve attempted to seduce it. You’ve perverted it; replaced our holy witnessing with your own Few readers will doubt that Banks’s inspiration owes foul pornography. . . . ‘Repulsive’ is barely adequate for something to Smith’s example. As Clute points out, Consider what I feel for your precious Culture, Gurgeh. I’m not sure Phlebas exposes the reader to a number of sly ironies, in that I possess the words to explain to you what I feel for your . . . the losing Idiran side, which Gorbuchul initially supports, Culture. You know no glory, no pride, no worship. You have is remarkably similar to the standard backdrop Galactic power: I’ve seen that; I know what you can do . . . but you’re 11 Empire found in routine space opera. still impotent. You always will be. The meek, the pathetic, the frightened and the cowed . . . they can only last so long, The Player of Games no how terrible and awesome the machines they From the Culture locked in conflict with its enemies, Banks crawl around within. In the end you will fail; all your glitter- now moved on to intervention by the Culture in the affairs ing machinery won’t save you. The strong survive. That’s of the more unattractive of its neighbouring civilisations. what life teaches us, Gurgeh, that’s what the game shows us. Jernau Morat Gurgeh — the protagonist of The Player of Struggle to prevail; fight to prove worth. These are no 13 Games — has become bored with defeating his competitors. hollow phrases: they are the truth’ His request for a greater challenge results in his being sent on a 100,000-light-year-journey to the Empire of Azad, where the Culture wants to bring down an exceptionally Banks stays with the theme of manipulation in Use of Weap- cruel regime. The nature of the Empire’s unpleasantness is ons. Deziet Sma — a Special Circumstances controller — revealed in part when a drone attending Gurgeh — Flere- has recruited and trained a brilliant agent in Cheradenine Imsaho — taps into an Imperial communication channel: Zakalwe. Zakalwe’s warrior skills are used repeatedly to further the agency’s projects. As often as his assignments Gurgeh watched the screen. Flere-Imsaho watched Gurgeh. result in his death, the agency resurrects him. As often as The man’s eyes glittered in the screen-light, unused pho- he is resurrected he resumes duty. He is also increasingly a tons reflecting from the halo of iris. The pupils widened at prey to self-doubt: ‘The Culture’, he reflects in the after- first, then shrank, became pinpoints. The drone waited for math of a significant intervention, ‘would take him away the wide, staring eyes to fill with moisture, for the tiny from here, and put him down somewhere else, and this muscles around the eyes to flinch and the eyelids to close adventure would collapse with the rest into meaningless- and the man to shake his head and turn away, but nothing ness, and nothing very much would be left, as he went on of the sort happened. The screen held his gaze, as though to do roughly the same thing somewhere else.’14 In time, the infinitesimal pressure of light it spent upon the room Deziet Sma discovers that she has known less about her had somehow reversed, and so sucked the watching man agent than she has supposed. A replacement for him is forward, to hold him, teetering before the fall, fixed and selected, and the cycle of intervention is resumed. steady and pointed at the flickering surface like some long- stilled moon. The screams echoed throughout the lounge,

12 Banks, I. M., The Player of Games, London: Macmillan, 10 Smith, E. E., Triplanetary, 1934, British edition: London: 1988, pp. 209–10. W. H. Allen & Co., 1971, pp. 222–3. 13 Banks, 1988, p. 283. 11 Clute, 1993, p. 88. 14 Banks, I. M., Use of Weapons, London: Orbit, 1990, p. 253.

5 Conclusion towards the prospective zones of turmoil whose inhabitants Substitute for the Culture any of the major developed are in every respect less fortunate is a question which we can nations, either singly or aggregated as in the United neither on moral nor practical grounds afford to ignore. Nations, and for Azad Somalia, Zaire or the former Yugo- What is needed in part is for us to better tolerate ambiguity slavia. Banks is a richly talented writer, whose science fiction and disappointment. That Banks makes the task easier — entertains while at the same time raising serious issues of that he encourages us to care and think — sets him apart public policy. How those of us who inhabit Singer and decisively from science-fiction practitioners of lesser Wildavsky’s prospective zones of peace conduct ourselves stature.

My Career Goes Bung

● My worst fears about unemployment have proved to be tainly possibilities around, but nothing is yet sitting on justified. My last regular cheque from Macmillan is on the desk. 1997 is definitely not going to be my year. I 1 February (or will fail to appear on 1 February; this is just hope to survive it somehow. More importantly, I not clear right at this moment, 27 January). My meagre hope I can save SF Commentary and The Metaphysical savings will need to last until I receive the first cheque Review from being the main casualties of 1997. of whatever freelance work I can find. There are cer-

BOOKS READ RECENTLY

These are books read since the end of November 1996. The ** If Morning Ever Comes ratings are: by Anne Tyler (Hamlyn 0-600-20411-1; original publi- ** Books highly recommended. cation date 1964; 187 pp.) *Books recommended When life and books seem stale, I sit down to enjoy an Anne Tyler novel. Fortunately, a few of them remain ** The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy unread. If Morning Ever Comes tells of a vague, un- by Brian W. Aldiss (Liverpool University Press 0-85323- formed boy who decides that college study in New York 289-X; 1995; 224 pp.) is not for him. He returns home, south, unexpectedly, In this book’s last paragraph, Aldiss quotes one of my and realises that he is just as baffled by ‘home’ as by favourite writers, George Borrow: ‘There’s day and leaving it. It’s Tyler’s usual plot, but the details, as ever night, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and in Tyler’s work, are fresh and arresting. I bought this stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind book the last time all of Tyler’s novels were reprinted; on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would I notice that they have just all been reissued in a new wish to die?’ The passage ends ‘A Personal Parabola’, uniform edition. Buy them all, and savour them over a talk in which Aldiss seeks to sum up Existence, the years. Writing and the RIL (Repressed Inner Life). Usually I ** A Very British Genre flinch when Aldiss generalises, but I find in this essay by Paul Kincaid (British Science Fiction Association a valid faith in life — its power to change, to reveal new 1-870824-37-7; 1995; 63 pp.) facets of itself, to upwell into consciousness. Reach My first reaction to this book was ‘It’s a bit short, isn’t back to the beginning of the book and you find Aldiss’s it? And it’s not telling me things I don’t know already.’ ebullience flowing through an appreciation of Salva- Which, as I came to realise, is the point of the book. dor Dali (‘Thanks for Drowning the Ocelot’), the Where else would anyone find a short history of British British New Wave (‘“A Robot Tended Your Re- science fiction and fantasy, with all the right people mains . . .”’), Aldous Huxley (‘Between Privy and Uni- mentioned in the right places and, despite the restric- verse’), Olaf Stapledon (‘The Immanent Will tions of length, all the things said about each that Returns — 2’) and many more. The endless questions should be said? In Trillion Year Spree? No, because in and assertions flow through this book, but Aldiss re- that book it became too difficult to separate the story mains best when his eye is fixed on the works of of a national genre from that of the whole SF boom of individual authors. The pieces on Huxley and Staple- the 1970s and 1980s. A Very British Genre even has room don, already mentioned, are valuable, but even more in its last few pages for many authors whose books have so are remarkable readings of Orwell’s 1984 (‘The never been distributed in Australia: a neat must-buy Downward Journey’) and H. G. Wells, always Aldiss’s list. The book’s only fault springs from that tricky word best subject (‘Wells and the Leopard Lady’), and a ‘genre’; here is the story of New Worlds in all its guises, tear-inspiring farewell to Theodore Sturgeon (‘The but Kincaid makes no mention of the role of the great Cruelty of the Gods’). To read Aldiss’s essays about SF post-War book publishers, especially Penguin during is to be reminded, for reminding is often needed, that the early sixties and Victor Gollancz, with its ‘yellow we SF readers feast at a laden table, no matter how jackets’. The latter comprised almost the only SF read rotten some of the individual dishes might be. by Australian (and probably British) library borrowers

6 Precious time by Marc Ortlieb as the last ten or so. Thus it isn’t surprising to find that some of the more elderly fen consider fen who have been The character in Catch-22 who claimed that if one were around a mere seven or so years to be Johnnie-come- bored enough one could live forever was right. I’m sure latelies. of it. At least the converse of his theory, which is also Of course, there are those young fen who will un- explained in the book, goes some way towards explaining kindly write off these phenomena as advancing senility, the fact that my life has been flashing past my eyes at a but it is far more than that. If you look at the symptoms rare old state of knots. described here, they bear marked similarities to the time It seems to me that your average fannish life can be dilation effect observed when objects approach the speed divided up into several stages. The first stage is that of of light. Now, although this seems obvious enough once neohood. At this time, our archetypal fan engages in a pointed out here, it’s not a concept that comes readily to prodigious fannish output. This fact was driven home to the mind, because, when one looks at these aged fen, me when I received a copy of the first volume of the SF high speed is the last thing that one thinks of. Commentary Reprint, which only covers one year, and yet The mistake here is in using the outmoded concepts includes eight issues of SFC. of fifties science fiction, which emphasised outer space Bruce Gillespie is not the only fan who started his rather than inner space. Each of us, you see, is travelling career by an incredible explosion of written fanac. Many life’s path towards some unimagined goal. It’s just that have sought to explain this in terms of the extra energy the older and more involved fen are further along the that neos have when compared to old and tired fen. path than neos, and, having a better idea of their desti- However, the real explanation is far more wonderful. You nation, can travel far faster than the newer voyagers. see, when you are a neofan, you get so bored by the things I guess that this still hasn’t explained how a meta- that you don’t understand that you have to do something phorical concept relates to good solid physics like the to use up that extra subjective time, and what better to time dilation effect. To do this one must go to those kill time than to sit in front of a typewriter and pound out scientific theories that show how, at the moment of death, fanzines??? the body loses a few grams in weight — the soul. If we are As the fan grows older, and more experienced in the travelling towards our goal, then surely it is the soul’s ways of fans and fanac, he/she becomes more and more journey, thus it is the speed of the soul that is affected by interested, or drops out entirely through sheer boredom. this time dilation effect. Now, as we have seen from Catch-22, being interested in Further confirmation of this comes from what might something makes the time go faster. The initial symptoms otherwise be considered a snide comment from neo to are quite minor, and can go unnoticed. The time be- bnf. Older fen are often accused of being ‘big heads’, and tween apa deadlines seems somehow to shrink. The plans rightfully so, because one of the consequences of the for a monthly zine go by the boards, the faned starts to increased velocity of the soul is that it gains weight as it think about a bimonthly schedule which he/she is all too approaches the speed of light. (All right, purists, I know aware is unlikely to be met. Copies of quarterly fanzines that, strictly speaking, mass is the correct term.) This also appear in the mail before the previous issue of that zine explains why some experiments chosen to determine the has made its way out of the ‘to be LoCed’ pile. The faned mass of the soul have failed. The souls were obviously not finds that the convention that seemed so far away last travelling fast enough, and so were of negligible mass. Easter is just around the corner, and that he/she has still That fanac does indeed help the soul to reach its not made a room booking. eventual destination is clearly documented in fanspeak, The results of this are easily noticed in older fans. where encouragement is referred to as ‘egoboost’. This They slow down in their zine production, considering an obviously sets the soul in motion. annual zine to be an ideal format, while expecting the Naturally there is still a great deal of research needed readership to be able to follow arguments stemming from in order to determine the implications of this discovery an obscure comment in the editorial of the issue before for the science fiction world in general. Is it, for instance, last. Such fans desert the monthly and bimonthly apas, possible to slow a fannish soul down to the point that the and are found in the FAPA membership list with ATM frequency of the fan’s publication schedule can be in- next to their names. When they do contribute, it’s usually creased to something more relevant to younger fen? the required eight pages, six and three quarters of which In the meantime it behooves we younger fen to per- are taken up with explanations of why the member haps take a little more notice of the infrequently appear- missed the previous three mailings. This is the sort of fan ing fanzines, for in them we may well see our own fannish who takes great joy in remembering the details of the last futures. Boredom is, after all, merely a stopgap measure, three issues of Science Fiction Five Yearly. and given, the quality of Australian fandom, it’s not easy It’s quite understandable, of course, as, for the deeply to get bored at a convention. Even if one is bored, not committed fan, it seems months between issues of SFFY. every convention features Jack Vance or Frank Herbert The time dilation effect has taken such a hold that the as GoH, so sooner or later, one is going to get to an mind has difficulty in relating to mundane time scales. interesting convention, and the rot will set in. I guess Of course this effect tends to telescope time for the we’re just going to have to face it: the sands of time do inflicted fan, so that the last five years take up as much tend to get into everything, especially at beach parties. memory space as the three years prior to that, and so on, until one’s first year in fandom can take up as much space

7 during the 1950s and 1960s. Next the BSFA should Love carries the usual burden of ho-hum stories, but its advance Kincaid the money to write The Trillion Year best stories give it an air of distinction. British Genre, a thousand pages long, studded with ** Unlocking the Air and Other Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin footnotes and appendices. (HarperCollins 0-06-017260-6; 1996; 207 pp.) ** Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future I keep thinking I know what Ursula Le Guin is up to. by Robert Crossley (Liverpool University Press With a collection like this, featuring stories that don’t 0-85323-388-8; 1994; 474 pp.) quite fit the SF or fantasy categories, I feel I can lean This is a rich and satisfying biography, a book that lets right in and go along for the ride. Many of the early you feel you’ve met this strange, distant figure; a book pieces are a bit twee and undeveloped; I found myself that sends you straight back to the novels, because you sneering ‘New Yorker stories’ under my breath. (That’s feel you could never have read them properly before because several of them were published first in The New reading the biography. My memory of this book is Yorker.) Never underestimate Le Guin. Towards the dominated by two images: that of Agnes Stapledon, the end of Unlocking the Air two stories brought me up author’s widow, giving Crossley the keys to the author’s short. ‘Olders’ and ‘The Poacher’ are two astonishing room thirty years after he had died, whereupon stories, penetrating and clear and serious, yet reveal- Crossley discovers that everything has been left exactly ing themselves in small unfoldings. ‘Olders’, set (it as it had been on the day he died; and that of Staple- seems) in the Earthsea world, begins with a voyage, don in New York in 1949, reviled by the American press turns into a fantasy, and becomes a pained and burn- for attending a large Peace Conference, finding that ing love story. ‘The Poacher’ begins as a modernised the only people who know his works are the members fairy story, turns into a modern version of yet another of the Hydra Club. There Stapledon spends one happy fairy story, then transforms itself into a complex meta- evening meeting all his favourite SF authors. At last he phor of the possibilities of life and art. Yet the surfaces is able to talk to people who had some idea of what he of both stories seem all so simple. This is not just is on about. When Stapledon dies the next year, none accomplished writing; these are stories that change of his books is in print. Pre-images and after-images of your idea of what fiction can achieve. these events haunt this account of Stapledon’s life and ** Last and First Men career. He pursued Agnes for many years, despite by Olaf Stapledon (Methuen; 1930; 355 pp.) many difficulties, but in his last years was to insist on Did Last and First Men really stop me in my tracks when an ‘open’ marriage because, quite simply, he still I tried reading it in 1973? Armed with the Crossley looked and felt young while she now seemed old. biography (which demonstrates that even the most Working within that isolation and detachment that esoteric details of Stapledon’s far futures are based on marks every aspect of his life, Stapledon more or less incidents and impressions from his life’s experience), invented modern science fiction, with Wells as his I launched into Last and First Men and found it a long mentor, only to find in his last years that his real literary but satisfying journey. Stapledon’s style is slightly pon- relatives were the American ‘pulp’ writers. And they derous, but always readable, and occasionally lyrical. repaid him by including him in SF’s group memory. His perceptions are often astonishing. Humanity does How many ‘classic’ SF works turn out to be based on not progress upward, but performs evolutionary Stapledon’s ideas! (Two come to mind immediately: cycles. We — the First Men — commit suicide, but the the aliens of Lem’s The Invincible and the Venus of Third Men almost make it to Utopia. Stapledon Kuttner’s Fury.) doesn’t believe in Utopia; even near-perfect humans ** Dark Love sink under the weight of accumulated errors. Natural edited by Nancy A. Collins, Eward E. Kramer & Martin disasters send humanity off to Venus, then outward to H. Greenberg (NEL 0-340-65439-2; 1995; 402 pp.) Neptune. Stapledon is a true Darwinian, describing an This original fiction anthology covers pretty much the endless, fascinating game of ping-pong between same territory as Off Limits, which I reviewed unfavour- chance and necessity. My interpretation of his many ably last issue, but it is a much more enjoyable book. stages of humanity is that they are a fictional way in The editors’ prejudice seems to be: if you mix sex and which Stapledon can unpack parts of his own soul. horror, you might as well have some fun doing so. Of What, he asks, are the many possibilities, good and course, some authors, such as Kathryn Ptacek bad, I might find in myself? Of great interest are the (‘Driven’) and Lucy Taylor (‘Heat’) merely enjoy get- number of his SF plot ideas that were used by later ting down and dirty, without worrying too much about writers (for instance, Stapledon’s Martians turn up, the quality of the fiction. The best writers in this virtually unchanged, in Lem’s The Invincible). If Wells’s volume take the subject matter as a challenge to their great SF works can be kept in print, why can’t the same sense of subtlety. The best story is Stuart Kaminsky’s privilege be given to Stapledon? ‘Hidden’, which seems to be about a child’s capacity ** Requiem to commit mayhem, but turns out to reveal much by Graham Joyce (Signet Creed 0-451-18434-3; 1995; deeper matters. Nancy Collins’s own ‘Hidden Things’ 305 pp.) also covers territory that is wider than the bloody After all the trouble I took to gain a copy of this book, events described in the surface story. Stephen King’s mainly because of massed Acnestid recommendations, ‘Lunch at the Gotham Café’, on the other hand, could I found it very slightly disappointing. I can hardly fault hardly be called subtle, but it is very funny. It just shows the portrait of a man possessed by the ghost (?) of his that if you arrange to meet your ex-wife for lunch, you dead wife, but even by novel’s end I was not sure that should watch out for whatever’s happening at the next that is what happens to him. Links to Mary Magdalene table. Unclassifiable, and also very funny, is Bob Bur- and yet another version of the Jesus Conspiracy are den’s ‘You’ve Got Your Troubles, I’ve Got Mine . . .’. fascinating, but again, I was never sure of their connec- He actually admits that crazy people can have fun. Dark tion to the main character. Ghostly apparitions and

8 bumps in the night are beautifully written, but in the by Barbara Vine (Penguin 0-14-015691-7; 1991; 356 pp.) end it’s all smoke. Some member of Acnestis must When I read King Solomon’s Carpet I had no more know what’s going on here; please tell me. Barbara Vine novels to read. Looks as if I’ll just have * The Orchard Thieves to reread the others. This novel is all about the London by Elizabeth Jolley (Penguin 0-14-025211-8; 1995; 131 pp.) Underground. One of the characters is nuts about For more than a decade Elizabeth Jolley has been underground railways. He owns a marvellous mauso- Australia’s most successful senior woman writer, but leum of a house (houses are usually the main charac- I’ve never felt drawn to her work. For the first 50 or 60 ters of Vine/Rendell novels) that sits between two pages I wondered why I had bothered to read this London Underground lines. The other characters, novella. (It’s because I had promised Ali Kayn to review most of whom board in the old house, are affected by it for her Web Page.) Then the story comes to life. The the Underground, which embodies Life itself: re- rather dotty old aunt who tells the story proves to be morseless, blind, multifarious, cruel. Vine was not feel- more astute than the family realises; a gold-digging ing kind towards the human race when she wrote this daughter who lumps in on the family proves to be so book. Each character is consumed by some obsession, unsubtle that she destroys her own enterprise, which and each object of obsession is lost. The details about is to force her mother out of the family house. I feel the Underground are luscious, making me want to that the last 60 pages forms the original story, whose read more. beginning Jolley later padded. Given that warning, I can recommend this little tale. ** King Solomon’s Carpet — Bruce Gillespie, 27 January 1997

FAVOURITE BOOKS 1996

Throughout 1996 I’ve been reviewing every book here as I’ve read it. Hence no mini-reviews:

1 The Prestige (Christopher Priest) 1995; Touchstone; 11 An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales 404 pp. (Oliver Sacks) 1995; Picador; 319 pp. 2 Faith Fox: A Nativity (Jane Gardam) 1996; Sinclair- 12 Dealers in Light and Darkness (Cherry Wilder) 1995; Stevenson; 312 pp. Edgewood Press; 166 pp. 3 (Iain Banks) 1992; Abacus; 490 pp. 13 The Moth (James M. Cain) 1949; Robert Hale; 356 4 The Blue Mountain in Mujani (Aina Vavare) pp. 1988/1990; Penguin; 173 pp. 14 Lilian’s Story (Kate Grenville) 1986; Allen & Unwin; 5 The Brimstone Wedding (Barbara Vine) 1996; Vin- 211 pp. tage; 312 pp. 15 , or Isis Amongst the Unsaved (Iain Banks) 1995; 6 I Served the King of England (Bohumil Hrabal) 1989; Little, Brown; 455 pp. Chatto & Windus; 243 pp. 16 In the Presence of the Enemy (Elizabeth George) 1996; 7 The Keys to the Street (Ruth Rendell) 1996; Hutchin- Bantam; 477 pp. son; 310 pp. 17 CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (George Saunders) 8 Distress (Greg Egan) 1995; Millennium; 343 pp. 1996; Jonathan Cape; 179 pp. 9 No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann 18 (Iain Banks) 1987; Futura; 249 pp. O’Brien (Anthony Cronin) 1990; Paladin; 290 pp. 19 Unlocking the Air and Other Stories (Ursula K. Le 10 Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future (Robert Guin) 1996; HarperPrism; 207 pp. Crossley) 1994; Liverpool University Press; 474 pp. 20 Ladder of Years (Anne Tyler) 1995; Chatto & Win- dus; 326 pp.

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